This paper seeks to re-conceptualize the research supervision relationship. The literature has tended to view doctoral study in four ways: (a) as an exercise in self-management, (b) as a research experience, (c) as training for research, or (d) as an instance of student-centred learning. Although each of these approaches has merit, they also…

Most students come to their graduate programs with academic writing skills insufficient to excel in their studies. A lack of academic writing skills among graduate students has been a problem in a college of education at a large southeastern public research university where the project described in this article was implemented. To address this…

For more than a decade now, a great deal of research has been done on the topic of written corrective feedback (CF) in SLA and second language (L2) writing. Nonetheless, what those research efforts really have shown as well as the possible implications for practice remain in dispute. Although L2 writing and SLA researchers often examine similar…

This paper starts from the premise that there is more to writing than simply skill, knowledge and ability, i.e. cognition. This is an important part of writing but is only one aspect of it. The paper discusses the idea of the affective domain and goes on to focus largely on the positive and negative attitudes and feelings of graduate students…

The discussion will describe how rubrics can help to provide effective assessment criteria for evaluating written assignments in college undergraduate classes. A student-centered theory focus will highlight how valuable teacher/student communication can help lead to improving student writing. Rubrics can be a practical way to improve feedback,…

A reading-writing initiative began in 2011-12 at the University of Toronto as a partnership between an East Asian Studies (EAS) department and an English Language Learning (ELL) Program. In this institution, students are expected to enter into scholarly discussions in their first year essays, yet many (both native English speakers and non-native…

This paper presents the description of an email Tandem exchange project conducted between 94 intermediate-level students (47 pairs) from Columbia University/Barnard College in New York and Universidad Autonóma de Madrid in Spain during the Fall Semester 2010. There were several goals to this project: to help improve students' writing skills; to…

In the research conducted by Truscott and Hsu (2008), the authors demonstrate that although rewriting corrected drafts results in lower grammar error rates on the rewritten texts, this effect does not carry over to a subsequent new writing task. The authors conclude that the result indicates that there may have been no language improvement from…

Nationwide, students in the middle grades and high school are failing to develop the reading and writing skills they need in order to meet higher academic standards. This report discusses the urgency of the problem and recommends that each Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) state develop a comprehensive set of policies that establishes…

Using data for school improvement is a key goal of Race to the Top, and now is the time to make data-driven school improvement a priority. However, many educators are drowning in data. Boost your professional learning community's ability to translate data into action with this new book from Pam Robbins and Robert T. Hess. "The Data Toolkit"…

The purpose of this paper is to define writing apprehension, describe the writing apprehension of 91 secondary preservice teachers of diverse subject areas, in a required content area literacy course, and explain how their writing apprehension was reduced significantly by authoring a "how-to" book. The "how-to" book assignment is explained and…

A secondary English teacher in the Bronx, Marisa Harford describes several self-reflective activities she has designed to improve students' writing skills. Beginning a new school year with activities like Harford's can focus students' efforts all year. (Contains 1 figure.)

Teaching the evaluation of information resources can be daunting for both students and educators. In an information environment in which resource types are ever-changing, how does the school librarian assess the evaluative skills of students? The assessments ought to reflect the malleable nature of online resources. To engage students in a…

Much that has been published to date on wiki use in college classes either explains what wikis are or speculates on what they might accomplish; few studies analyze how wikis have and have not worked when actually used in college classes. To this end, we report on a study conducted over two quarters, with three classes and two teaching teams in a…

Adult students are more anxious about writing for school, less familiar with academic conventions, and more likely to drop out than younger students. For students learning to move between personal, work, and academic discourse communities, the ongoing and explicit writing instruction argued for in the research of Sternglass, Herrington and Curtis,…